This is the Snettisham Great Torc. Apparently the most famous object from Prehistoric Britain. We were surprised to find it in Perths Museum today. Even more surprised to find the British Museum had also exported their gift shop along with their touring exhibition. At lease it was nice to find some extra exhibits. When we visited Cairo Museum in Egypt a few years ago we found Tutankhamen was on tour in the UK.

This image was accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for high resolution download here.

In more recent news. We have just bought a 1987 Toyota Hiace Campervan. We will be leaving Perth tomorrow morning to begin our own tour of Australia.

This is a 1943 John Deere tractor which has been lovingly restored for classic farm shows. This may be the last post from the UK as we are in the final staged of moving to Australia. I will try to post daily once we are out there. Next stop Perth.

This is the Belton Folly near Grantham in the UK. I wanted to get a bit more colour and detail in the sky. This is a situation where a graduated filter would help. Graduated filters are bits of glass you fit in front of the lens to help the camera get a good exposure. When shooting landscapes the sky is almost always far brighter than the land. Although our eyes are very good at seeing the detail in the sky and land at the same time a cameras sensor will often overexpose the sky or underexpose the land. A grad filter is clear at the bottom and slowly gets darker towards the top of the picture. Unfortunately Cokin who make the filters seem to have gone bankrupt but I hear they have recently been bought out. Anyway I could not find any camera shops with any Grad ND filter kits to fit my new lens. Fortunately there was enough detail in the sky for Photoshop to apply a filter after taking the shot. Although Photoshop does give you far more control in applying filters in post processing I still think there is a place for old school filters. Using HDR is another way of solving this problem but the results often look less natural.

This Yellow Rose was taken at the end of the Garden in Grantham, UK. I used sRGB colour space instead of my normal Adobe RGB. Colour space determines the actual colour a specific RGB value corresponds to. Adobe RGB has a wider range of colour but this does mean each colour is further apart. For 8bit files you can visibly see a change when you shift a value by just 1. This is not great if you want smooth gradients but it does give richer Cyans and Greens. The narrower sRGB colour range is the standard for web output as it approximates the colour range of most common computer displays but for how long. The last display I bought boasted 100% Adobe RGB which means it will not be long before most can show these extra colours. For now I’m going to do some test posts in sRGB as no matter how good your monitor is you are limited by how your browser decides to display the colours.

N.B. After testing Firefox reproduces colours far more faithfully than I.E.

These terrestrial and celestial globes where on display in Belton House. If anyone knows if this style of globe have some special name please leave a comment. Although photography was allowed in Belton House the light was very dim and flash was not allowed. In situations such as this a high ISO value is needed. ISO is the sensitivity of the film or sensor. The trade off is an increase in noise. My old camera had an ISO range from 100-800 but if I wanted to submit something for Stock Photography I could only use the low noise shots taken at ISO 100. This was taken with a Canon 5D mark II at ISO 3200 and had a remarkable lack on noise. I don’t know good enough for stock but its still very impressive.

This is Belton Park in Lincolnshire, UK. It was the first chance to test out my new Canon 5D Mark II. It’s nice to be using a camera without a schizophrenic auto focus for a change.  The Mark II has been out for three years now and many believe a mark III will be announced soon. The good news is Canon have dropped the price of the Mark II recently which means you can get a lot of camera for your money.

To process this image I used the HSL/Grayscale tab in Camera RAW. This lets you change the saturation of individual colours. For this image the purple of the background flowers could be increased without over saturating the yellows in the grass.

This is Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, UK. The original image was a little underexposed in the shadow areas. I used Fill Light in Camera RAW to bring back some detail. Lens Correction was also used to straighten the walls.

This lucky shot was taken on the way home from the Ferry Meadows firework display. The only reason the four figures are not blurred in this 1 second exposure was that they stopped for a moment while their friend in the centre took a shot. Anyone in the right place at the right time with the perfect light has the chance to capture a great shot. As you learn more about photography you can increase the frequency of capturing these images. If you are an amateur photographer you could benefit from selling your work online. It is no coincidence the rise of micro stock agencies has coincided with the increase of the photography hobbyist. I can understand why professional photographers would be concerned with current changes to the stock industry. Crowd sourcing images has inherent advantages. Stock photography sites never reject images without a reason and suggestions to improve your photography. If you can take criticism it can be an invaluable learning tool. Professional photographers would probably find rejection far harder to stomach especially if they had been used to selling their work for much more at traditional stock agencies. The image below greets you when you login to shutterstock as a submitter. It shows where your latest sales have come from. Interestingly none of them have sold in the countries they were taken in.

The original photograph was taken by Kerim Okten. I knew as soon as I saw this image online it would be one of the defining images of the London Riots. Sure enough it was used by The Daily Star, Daily Mail, i, Daily Express, The Telegraph, The Sun and the BBC as a backdrop for their newsreaders. Its a powerful shot but I did not want to help glamorise what is ultimately pointless destruction. I’ve added some elements in an attempt to change the message.

THE RIOTERS PRAYER
Our father, who art in prison, only mum knows his name, thy Riots come, read it in the sun, in Birmingham, as it is in London, give us this day our Welfare bread & forgive us our looting, as we’re happy 2 loot those who defend stuff against us, lead us not into employment but deliver us free housing, 4 thine is the Spliff, the Blackberry & the Lager, forever & ever…Innit

This is Braunston in Rutland, UK. It is a beautiful old English village. To make it look a little older I removed all the pylons, wires, concrete and tarmac. To add some colour to the sky I used the color range tool to select the bright areas of the sky. This selection was used to create a mask which was applied to a gradient. The Blend mode Multiply was used as this is the most forgiving when it comes to masks of light colours over dark colours. A rough mask set to Multiply will not cover the branches or leave a halo. The worst that can happen is the thinnest branches get a slight hint of blue. Even this could be argued as a natural effect of soft focus so the end result looks natural.